All I can say is: DOES IT RUN FASTER THAN LR 4? CAN I ACTUALLY GET ANYTHING DONE WITH THIS ONE?!?!?!?!

The switch between Library to Develop modules seems to be much faster. It still isn't instant, but there isn't that "oh come ON" frustration when switching. I'd say it's between 1/2 to 1 second MAX. FWIW, my files are from a 6D.

Exporting a full size JPEG took about 1 second on my i7 3770k with 16GB RAM.

All I can say is: DOES IT RUN FASTER THAN LR 4? CAN I ACTUALLY GET ANYTHING DONE WITH THIS ONE?!?!?!?!

I don't have any problems with this one, nor 4.4/4.3. Sounds like you need to upgrade your box. Everything is instantaneous, not a single second of lag. Even the spot heal tool works instantaneously. Running smooth as butter on a dual quad-core Xeon 3.4, 32GB RAM, U320 15K SCSI RAID6, 512GB SATA6 cache drive, Quadro 2000. The JPG exports are almost realtime.

I wonder if Adobe's new product release MO is going to look a lot like this update to LR. It seems most people are bored with the update. Personally, I'm excited about some of the features as they are really useful to me (and there is a speed improvement), but a lot of the photo community seems just totally underwhelmed. Perhaps Adobe is moving more toward focusing on the product, rather than on press as they re-tune their products to be updated more frequently. New product hype is great free publicity, so that would be a strange move if you ask me, but it does seem a little like that is where they are heading.

Not being one to believe everything I read, I took a image obviously in need of sharpening and created a output with no output sharpening and one with high output sharpening. It works fine for me.

UpDate:Thinking that one of the three possible settings might not be working, I tested export for screen, export for matte paper, and export for glossy paper. The sharpening worked for all, but it is very subtle in the export for screen mode such that it is not as obvious as the export for glossy paper that I showed below.It does work, however, for all three.

Then, I did the exact same thing using LR 4.5 and the results were identical.